Flying bush trips is a great way to get to know places I’ve never been to, yet only having the navlog text in the game is very limiting. Therefore, I created a repeatable process to convert bush trip text to PDF + LittleNavMap flight plan that includes POI names and descriptions.
I use the pdf to read more about the country, click the links to read more about different cities, view the plan as a google map directions or on skyvector and finally able to fly each leg from the world map with my choice of aircraft and ATC.
The pdf contains information to help you familiarize with the overall trip and each leg:
Bush trip description, total distance and ETE. View the trip in google maps driving direction, and in Skyvector.
Each leg has a link to skyvector so you can get familiar with the area, similar to how you would prepare for a flight in real life
Each leg has a link to google map driving direction. This is another cool way to study a trip. Note: driving directions and flying are not the same and google cannot draw routes that don’t follow roads.
Each waypoint has description, along with heading, distance, altitude, ete. and links to google map and sky vector.
Other than the PDF there are MSFS flight plans for each leg of the bush trip.
Download the default bush trips from WU1-WU9 here:
if you want to study the bush trip prior to flying it in the sim
if you want to fly the bush trip without the bush trip interface - so you get ATC, option to show POI names on the world etc.
You wouldn’t want this PDF if:
you like the challenge of navigating the bush trips only using the navlog heading / ete interface.
I am converting the bush trips using a python open source python program I wrote: https://github.com/mb-dev/msfs-bushtrip-flight-plan that works together with the sbp to xml utility to decode bush trip descriptor.
Thanks, this is really helpful. So that Python script would allow to provide a pdf for virtually any Bush Trip? This would be something I’ve been waiting for for a long time.
Not sure how accessible this script is for a normal user, but it’s definitely a great start!
Wow, this is a great idea. The bush trips have been nothing but a headache as they have so many bugs. This workflow could make them actually usable. Of course I open them in LittleNavMap but they’re not as fun to fly because of lacking the POI descriptions which it seems you have solved. Thanks for the effort. I’m going to give your scripts a try.
Yes it should be able to convert any bush trip but I only tested with the official ones so far. The python utility creates html file and I print the html file to a pdf.
I tried to make it work for the microsoft-bushtrip-grandalpinechallenge but convert.py failed right away because I didn’t have the dms2dec module. I tried to install the module in VSCode and in WSL but couldn’t get it to work. I’m not that experienced installing python modules so I’m sure it’s my fault. In any case I guess I’ll wait for your releases.
I am using windows python 3.10 I got from windows store and IntelliJ community edition with the python plugin. InteliJ told me that in windows I’ll need to pip install as admin and did it for me when opening the project. Want to try IntelliJ?
I want to add the ability to convert to sky vector flight plan. I have to figure out the lat/Lon format they use. Any ideas what format sky vector uses?
It would be great if this script could be turned into something an average user can handle. While it’s much acknowledged you provide the results freely via Flightsim.to this doesn’t work for commercial Bush Trips like the ones I bought e.g. from Perfect Flight.
Unfortunately, I’m not educated enough in coding to even judge if this can be done…
And yes, I can completely double the two motivations for making a .pdf/extended .pln couple in your original post. Plus, add the several bugs how MSFS handles these trips. Believe me, I’m so happy someone is tackling those Bush Trips as the very base concept is nice indeed.
It would be great if this script could be turned into something an average user can handle. While it’s much acknowledged you provide the results freely via Flightsim.to this doesn’t work for commercial Bush Trips like the ones I bought e.g. from Perfect Flight.
That’s a good idea to set the open source project goal to be usable by average users. The easiest way for average users to use a tool is to have a UI. but i am not an expert in writing UI code and don’t have the time to work on a UI at the moment. If anyone wants to contribute a UI or make a similar project with a UI that will be great.
Otherwise, over time I will add the following features to make it more automated so the end user just has to give a path to the bush trip:
automatically find the pln, xml etc.
automatically decode the sbp (this requires the code to be compatible with MSFS Steam and Store version)
copy the images to a temporary folder and automatically resize them
use a library to generate pdf, such as pdfkit
generate little nav map plan instead of relying on me manually creating it from the flt file.
When it comes to Perfect Flight - I hope they see that people want to use this format to fly bush trips and supply a similar PDF themselves that is better formatted and with more screenshots.
I was flying this last night in the F35b using the STOVL capability to climb all those high mountains. It was amazing to be able to fly this trip in my chosen plane and my chosen time of day. I encourage everyone to fly this trip The sights are amazing. Thanks.
I am really enjoying flying these Bush trips, specially with partial legs, any acft you want, etc. What a way to enjoy the scenery of the sim, here is where it really shines. I really appreciate the work of SealingAuto4155 and all other contributors. I will give it a try when you publish this last script. I tried before with the previous instructions but something was lost in translation and it did not work for me, my programming skills are limited. At first I started splitting the long trips in partial stages with LittleNav Map, now I saw that some of the new releases are doing that,that is great, I love to fly these bush adventures, thank you again for your work.
Hey there TunefulLlama39! thanks for your reply. the script is updated and is now creating a plan for each leg as you observed. i am updating one or two bush trips at a time on flightsim.to.
Feel free to try running the script if you want to, but otherwise, all trips will be updated in the next few days.
@jgklopfe thanks for reporting the issue. looks like a bug in the code that generates the LittleNavMap file. I fixed it and updated Nevada and Balkans trips. I’ll have to fix all the bush trips with a new version.
Great job creating these Bush Trips in Little Navmap. It is so nice to be able to see the path you are on especially when POIs don’t show up on the VFR map. Keep up the great work!
